BACK BEAT
MISTER BIG

he's back again with a blockbuster movie and an expanding waistline. how does john travolta keep bouncing back, asks garth pearce john travolta and fame are like a man in a revolving door. no hollywood star has been in and out so often -- or so fast. he has known hot, and very hot: the man of the moment, who walks the walk and talks the talk. he has also been cold, dead in the water, far out on the freezing edges of what is hip, chic and wanted.but travolta is the biggest gambler in hollywood, using his own career as the stakes. he has never known any sort of stability. just being there is not for him. he arrives for our meeting like no other actor. forget first-class travel and a chauffeur-driven limousine. he has piloted himself into london, overnight from a visit to chicago, on one of his three super-luxury jets. he has taken a speedboat along the thames to complete the journey. the man is 47, for goodness sake, but he owns the toy cupboard. and there are no awkward moments with him. ask what you like and he's back with an answer. scientology, fatherhood, failure, being a good husband, tom and nicole, bruce and demi, money -- loads of it -- food and being a fatty. he gives it large. he's got a movie to plug, of course, and this is why our conversation is taking place. it comes on the back of a couple of stinkers, too: lucky numbers and the derisory battlefield earth, a science-fiction movie based on a story by his scientology hero, l ron hubbard, in which his face was plastered with what looked like a plate of spaghetti. it also comes after a long public silence, during which he has had a daughter, ella bleu, now 15- months-old, with his actress wife, kelly preston. they also have a nine-year-old son, jett. travolta sets the tone right away as we discuss his latest film, swordfish, a nonstop action movie in which he plays a rich and dangerous spy with long hair, dark suits and the sort of chilly blue-eyed menace that he delivered in the 1995 hit broken arrow, and reprised in face/off, two years later. the film has stoked up some controversy in america, where it has already taken a respectable 42.8m pounds, over a debut naked scene from the sexually powerful 33-year-old halle berry. "she's so beautiful, it's a freak of nature," he declares. "i ruined one scene completely, when she was just wearing lingerie. i was supposed to say: 'well, this is friendly'. but i forgot my line, and heard myself saying: 'god, just look at the body'. it was really unprofessional. what a turn-on that woman is." there is no forced laddishness here. travolta is smartly dressed in a navy-blue suit and open-collared blue shirt, and he is polite. he has counted them all in over the past quarter of a century, whether it's olivia newton-john ("an innocent sexuality, the kind of girl you want to take home to mom") or uma thurman ("exotic, stunning, mysterious"), and he's not about to get down and dirty on details. but if he knows his way around hollywood, he also gives the impression of knowing his way around women, money and the good life. "i like living well," he says, taking a poke at his solid waistline. he might be light on his feet, but he has a well-fed look on a 6ft 1in frame, and is clearly not in the least ashamed of it. "i hate exercise and love food, but i have been working on getting some weight off for a year now, almost every day," he says. "i have only lost 22lb, which i thought would be much more. i am down to 207lb. is all that effort worth always having just one piece of pizza rather than two? i am not too sure. but i love it. the more they talk about my weight and comebacks, the better it is." yet there was a time when even his best friends did not talk about comebacks. he has enjoyed a succession of hits in the 1970s, including saturday night fever in 1977, and, a year later, grease. urban cowboy in 1980 even started a fashion trend for western wear. then the rot first set in. flop films such as two of a kind and the experts marked his 1980s slump. by 1989, travolta had taken on what looked like a limp-looking project about a baby who talked, called look who's talking, filmed in vancouver for cheapness, and even his cast were having doubts about his judgement. "it is the saddest fact, but kirstie alley, the actress i was working with, told everybody: 'he is not cognisant of the idea that he has cooled off'," he recalls. "it was true. it was probably self-protection and me not wanting to face the truth." it is insisted that nobody currently in hollywood has survived longer than travolta, and the $7m-budget look who's taking eventually grossed $400m, and made the profit-sharing start a total of $100m. "there are only three projects in my whole career that i actually trusted -- grease, look who's talking and phenomenon (1996). the rest, i have always had to second-guess. i just go through my little dance with it and try and get some rewrites done," he says. there are those who say he should have either danced off into the horizon or rewritten the entire script for battlefield earth, but he remains bullish. "science fiction is notoriously criticised. i looked up the reaction to the classic film 2001, and at the time, the washington post f***ing creamed it. it must be the genre."